Archive

Quotes

O citizens, first acquire wealth; you can practice virtue afterward.

—Horace, c. 8 BC

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

—George Borrow, 1843

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!

—George H. W. Bush, 1990

Every country has the government it deserves.

—Joseph de Maistre, 1811

The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones.

—Anthony Burgess, 1972

The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects.

—Laozi

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

—Frederick Douglass, 1855

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

—E.B. White, 1944

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, 1887

Do that which consists in taking no action, and order will prevail.

—Laozi, c. 500 BC

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

—Walter Bagehot, 1863

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

—Alexander Hamilton, 1787

The Revolution is made by man, but man must forge his revolutionary spirit from day to day.

—Che Guevara, 1968